Seeking Ferret

jukebox_fest revealed its stories!

I got an awesome fic for David Bowie's "Starman".

Do Rock Stars Come From Outer Space? (1220 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Starman - David Bowie (Song)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Original Character/Original Character
Characters: Johnny (The Narrator), Claire, Claire's Father, The DJ, The Starman
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - 1970s, Science Fiction, Rock Stars, Glam Rock, Gender Identity, Romance, Hopeful Ending
Summary:

Rock stars are too beautiful to be mere human beings. They must be aliens...

Find the rest of the stories in the collection here.

fic_corner isn't happening this year- instead hh will be hosting a children's TV exchange called youcandothatinfanfiction. I won't be participating, as I don't feel all that fannish about children's TV.

fic_corner's not the only exchange to try this alternating related exchanges approach. invisible_ficathon is trying something similar, and I likewise didn't participate in the Lost Library iteration of the exchange. It's a little frustrating as a model to me, because I figure it has to reduce overall participation in the sub-exchanges and make it harder to the exchange to build momentum and community. Invisible Ficathon's 60 works went down to 30 works for Lost Library. But I guess we'll see what happens. Hopefully if the mods run Invisible Ficathon again, the people like me who left will come back.



jukebox_fest stories revealed!

I received a really sweet, nostalgic "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard" fic:

don't know where I'm going (1389 words) by evewithanapple
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard (Song)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Summary:

Most of the people who live there now probably never heard about what happened back in the day.

I judge based on the narrator's choice of beer that she is Rosie, the so-called 'queen of Corona'. There is a petty and parochial part of me that is irked that this version does not acknowledge the most likely actual explanation of that line, which is that Rosie is a major community figure in Corona Park, Queens, NY. But that part of me is overwhelmed by the part of me that just enjoys Rosie's incisive, sentimental mythologizing.




I wrote an 8675309 dystopia taking my recip's suggestion that the number might be some sort of registration number. In general I did my normal Jukebox thing of taking a non-genre song and writing an extremely tropey SF story.

number on the wall (1378 words) by seekingferret
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 867-5309 / Jenny - Tommy Tutone (Song)
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Characters: Jenny (8675309)
Summary:

Jenny don't change that number, he says, bafflingly.

I have mixed feelings about this story. Except for the first two hundred words and the last thirty, this was written in a half hour sprint the day before stories were due. It was really good writing, one of those moments where you just have the right words, and it was helped by a computer crash that lost me my first pass, because I got to rewrite those inspired words even more sharply. Still, the time pressure wasn't all positive, I think. The story has an unsettling brutality to it that comes from its abrupt, economical pacing. This was partially by design, but it was also a necessary economy driven by timing. I didn't have time in the story to dwell on backstory or detail, but I also didn't have time to think up backstory or detail. The last thirty words written, the paragraph beginning "She thinks of the office, of her job with Jefferson Accounting." was written after the submission deadline in order to back off the brutality of the ending just enough. I'm not certain I did it right, but the comments, particularly morbane's, suggest the pacing worked well enough. I dunno, the story works, so I shouldn't be too bothered by my bad process.

I need to get out of the habit of writing exchange fics in half-hour bursts the day before they're due, though. I've been really out of writing of late, defaulting on purimgifts, which still bothers me. I need to get back to writing. I'm hoping that some of the advice and ideas from Balticon will help with that.

For the jukebox_fest song-based fanfiction exchange, my assignment fic was for Courtney Barnett's "Pedestrian at Best". I discovered Barnett's music about two weeks before Jukebox- I think her new album is fantastic and I think "Pedestrian at Best" is a phenomenal song, channeling a hefty dose of Nirvana and filtering it through Barnett's own perverse sense of humor.

It was tricky to figure out how to fic it, though. It's not a song about a plot, it's a song about a character, and I needed to find a scenario that character could realistically inhabit.

Project Origami Money (1189 words) by seekingferret
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Pedestrian at Best- Courtney Barnett
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Original Characters
Summary:

Give me all your money, and I'll make some origami, honey

I wrote three different partial story drafts, including one where the pedestrian at best character was a mediocre robot, a comic parody of a Three Laws robot. There's a lot of mechanical imagery in the song, and it was a fun idea but I couldn't break the plot. In the end, I wrote a story about a ridiculous tax dodge as art installation.

morbane's comment on the story is intriguing- she wonders if the whole art installation is a scam of some sort. To which I would say that regardless, somebody is being scammed in this story, either the IRS or the investors, and I'm not entirely sure who.

I am not an expert on tax law and I did not do any research in order to write this story, except for a couple back of the envelope calculations about the space taken up by various amounts of money and paper. That said, I do not believe this tax scheme would actually work under current law, and if it did, it would immediately be criminalized. That's not really the point.

The point is that there is a constant and sometimes difficult relationship between commerce and art and government, because we (mostly rightly, I think) believe that art is deserving of protections from government interference, but this means that sometimes when commercial entities create art, they thereby gain protections from legitimate government regulation. There is no good clean way to adjudicate the boundaries of art and commerce, which means we must make balancing decisions about the virtues of art and commerce constantly in the grey areas.

Presently in America we are debating the question of whether money is speech. Of course it is not, and yet there is no way to regulate money universally without infringing on speech. And so we might burn money in the name of art.

And yet... art must, I think at least, have aesthetic interests. One of the jokes of this story is the deliberate anti-art aesthetic of the final exhibition. Anti-art is still an aesthetic, I think, though a difficult one to appreciate, and therefore a difficult one to create well. I do think that the story's punchline works because Hester has something worth saying, but she hasn't found a sufficiently elegant way to say it. And that particular phenomenon is something that all viewers of 21st century art are familiar with.




As a pinch hit, I wrote a story as well for Josh Ritter's beautiful "The Temptation of Adam". It's the second time I have ficced this song, which is why I felt comfortable claiming the pinch hit. The first was The Last Temptation of Eve, which I wrote for Yuletide five years ago. Both times, I wrote the story in under two hours from idea to completion... It's clear that this song has been resonating in my head for a long time.

I was also heavily influenced in this story by having recently read Alan Beyerchen's fasinating Scientists under Hitler: Politics and the physics community in the Third Reich, which looked at the Nazi push to create a Deutschephysik purified of Jewish influence, and the resistance of the German scientific community. The first three paragraphs of the fic bubbled up purely from my ruminations on that book, but I think they set the stage for what follows quite effectively.

What follows is a story that amplifies the moral ambiguity and tension of desire that makes the original song so mesmerizing. The Atom Bomb is a thing which since its creation has been associated, even or especially by its creators, with the usurpation of God's domain by Humankind. Our corresponding uncertainty about the power is about our mistrust of our ability to live Godly lives. Ritter's primary Biblical correspondence is to Adam and Eve and the serpent in the Garden, but surely there is also a parallel to God in John 3:16, who so loved the world that he sacrificed his son for it. Adam so loves Marie that he contemplates sacrificing the world for her. And meanwhile, is she sacrificing the world for him?

The Uncertainty Principle (1080 words) by seekingferret
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Temptation of Adam - Josh Ritter (Song)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Marie/Narrator (Last Temptation of Adam)
Characters: Marie (Last Temptation of Adam), Narrator (Last Temptation of Adam)
Summary:

Only the tough will claw their way to the afterlife: the Ouroboros Society motto.

Meanwhile, the gift I received was a wonderfully funny, absurd "Dark Fantasy" fic. Kanye builds this scenario out of dense allusive images, and this story expands those images out to give each component room to express itself separately. Kanye sings "Mercy, Mercy Me- Murcielago" for the sound of it, but he manages to conjure a contrast between the artistry of the African-American music of Kanye's childhood and the conspicuous consumption of contemporary hip hop, between history and living in the moment, between doing something bad for the right reasons and doing something good for the wrong ones. The fic just has a Lambo that sings Marvin Gaye.

The result is something a lot bigger than you would expect it to be, which maintains the humor and irony of the original and also manages to keep the sense of social purpose that is curiously present in all of Kanye's most seemingly unserious work.

Twisted Fiction (2758 words) by merryghoul
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Dark Fantasy - Kanye West (Song)
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Kanye West, Lucifer, Steve Urkel, Original Characters, Original Non-Human Character(s), Headless Horseman
Additional Tags: Spells & Enchantments, Cutting, Blood, Blow Jobs, Surreal, High School, Army, Shopping Malls, Heroin, Going to Hell, Hallucinations, Recreational Drug Use, Faustian Bargain
Summary:

Kanye can't believe all of this is happening to him. Or is it?

Dear Jukebox Hero,

I don't really know what to say in this letter. My taste in musical is pretty broad and I have tended to classify my overriding interest to be the 'glorious failure'. I like music that is ambitious, even if it doesn't always completely hang together. And I like music that tells stories, and I like thinking about what stories mean.


Dark Fantasy - Kanye West (Song)

Such a brilliant song, such a brilliant calling card for Kanye. It's about Kanye as Producer as much as it is about Kanye as Rapper- Kanye doesn't see himself as a performer so much as he sees himself as a Creator, I think, and this song is all about staking out all of that territory.

I'm not expecting RPF, certainly, but I would figure it's impossible to totally erase Kanye's shadow from this song. But I particularly love the final verse, with its macabre visions of devils in unlikely places, and I would love a story that fleshed out that prophetic 'fantasy'.

Rincon - Dan Bern (Song)

My new favorite baseball song, it's about a person making an almost religious pilgrimage to a small California seaside town to try to catch a glimpse of their tarnished hero, Barry Bonds. Bonds is making his own pilgrimage in search of 'the magic cure', the medical or pseudomedical or outright fake treatment that promises to once more prolong his improbable and ambiguous baseball career.

Bridges and Balloons - Joanna Newsom (Song)

I think this is practically the perfect ode to wanderlust and the adventuring spirit, and I just love how Newsom's language informs the shape of her dreamscape.

The Sprawl - Sonic Youth (Song)

I'm interested in its vague connections to the Gibsonverse, which takes what would otherwise be a passionate. grounded, specific Kim Gordon lyric, a lyric that seems pretty clearly to be about Sonic Youth's New York environs, and gives it a broader science fictional context.

The Singer Addresses His Audience - The Decemberists (Song)

I'm not really sure what I'm looking for. An explication of the wedding incident? A grounding of the surreality of these lyrics in the reality of the Decemberists' grappling with fame? Another story about The Singer?

Chips Ahoy - The Hold Steady (Song)

I love how this is basically a Ray Bradbury story in song form, a little miniature fantasy about a girl who can predict the future and uses it to win gambling on horse races and score drugs.

Foreign Object - The Mountain Goats (Song)

If you choose to write for this song, I personally will stab you in the eye with a foreign object.



Thanks!

Time for Jukebox reveal! I must confess a certain bemusement with the way this story emerged. This was not a song I knew before this challenge- I listened to it when it was nominated, found myself tolerantly amused by it, and decided on a whim to offer it, without any idea of where a story might go if I actually matched on it.

The day I got the assignment, I wrote the following snippet:

I met the Gambler on a train once. You know, the one from the song.

I said to him, "Hey, buster, I've listened to that song a hundred times, and it's terrible advice. You meet this guy and you're about to die. You tell him things that you think he ought to know, like "when to hold 'em", but you don't tell him how to learn these things. I'm not letting you out of here until you tell me HOW to know when to hold 'em." He refused, so I shot him.

I didn't know where to go from there. I imagined writing a story where my narrator shot a succession of characters from songs, for a variety of critiques, a story completely madcap, its lack of genre its defining feature, and eventually rejected the idea, but some of that narrator's rhetorical pose of brutish, philosophical toughness definitely endured in the narrator I did end up writing.

This is what I wrote instead:

Have Spacesuit (5114 words) by seekingferret
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Kill Your Heroes - AWOLNATION (Song)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Author Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Original Characters
Summary:

It began six months earlier. Our whole crew was working as freelance astrologers in Tampa, hacking into NASA satellites to get the inside scoop on the cosmological phenomena that really predicted the future. It wasn't the most glamorous work, but the money was fantastic.

"Have Spacesuit" was driven by a literal interpretation of the second verse's musings about the Earth hypothetically being destroyed some day as a motivation for carpe diem. It was also inspired, as last year's fic was inspired by Monster of the Week shows like Supernatural, Buffy, and the like, by a group of somewhat obscure SF stories: Ben Bova's Rock Rats series and Sam Gunn series, John Varley's Red Thunder series, Brian Francis Slattery's Spaceman Blues, even [though I'm loath to credit it, since Harrison's prose is an embarrassment to the genre] Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat cycle: stories about a future that still has people living on the margins of society, scraping by with ingenuity by seizing opportunities more fortunate people are blind to. Guardedly optimistic tales of the future of the 99%, if you will.

These stories, by the way, are the reason I hate the typical anti-meme that people throw around in response to the stupid meme about how SF used to be optimistic and is now full of dark futures. Battlestar Reboot and Star Trek TOS are typical stick figures of the argument, and so critics of the meme usually attack Star Trek by pointing to its progressive blind spots, its tedious storytelling, its bad acting and aggressive moralizing. This is a terrible argument that tears down our genre needlessly. Instead, the response to the stupidity of pining for Star Trek should be to point to writers like Bova, Varley, Slattery, to writers like Ken McLeod and Justina Robson and Melissa Scott and Charles Stross [and in the Star Trek era, people like Fred Pohl and Bob Silverberg] who write optimistically about disastrous futures. But I digress.

This story gets its start in 'the shadow economy', people skating dubious ethical and legal lines just to survive. If it takes anything important from the song that inspired it, it's the notion of opposition between normal people, the ideations of the song, and 'heroes', who are somehow another class altogether. I built this contrast on a simplified take on the complex relationship between the highly educated NASA workers on the Cape and the dirty Florida towns that surround it, drawing much inspiration from the junkyard astronauts of the Varley series I mentioned, not to mention the Drive-By Truckers' bitter Huntsville ballad "Puttin' People on the Moon". But much more than a political story, this is a story about people, people I attempted with every trick of trope subversion I know to sketch as vividly as possible in as few words as possible. Polo, who knows people in ways the narrator finds inexplicable, Karen the midwestern physicist who likes action movies, Selim, who studied interior decorating, Richard, who can't stay off the comms, Galina, who knows things the way Polo knows people... They were all a blast to imagine and I was as happy as my narrator that they got to survive. But my narrator was the best part. I still couldn't tell you my narrator's name, gender, occupation, sexual orientation, height, skin color, age, level of education... the thing that built this narrator was a little intentionality and a lot of bravado, and the idea of obscuring the things about identity that a narrator assumes about themself so deeply that they don't imagine needing to explain them. I hope people assume that my narrator is male and are shocked to find he is queer at the end. I hope people assume my narrator is female and are pleased by how much separation she has from 'female narratives'. I hope people build all sorts of working hypotheses about my narrator's identity that the story refuses to confirm, or actively rejects.

The morality underpinning this story is emphatically not mine. If I learned what my Zeroes did, I would not keep that information secret and steal a NASA spacecraft. But it's fun to imagine I would.

P.S. I'm sorry for the terrible science in this story. I feel bad about that, but if I were going to write this story as hard SF it would have been a novel.